


To All Our Last Sunrises

by duchessofthemoonbase



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Whouffaldi Week 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 17:21:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6338302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchessofthemoonbase/pseuds/duchessofthemoonbase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whouffaldi Week Day 4-"Make a wish", fairy lights, winter.</p><p>Clara has not allowed herself to think about someone for a very long time...</p><p>Fifty years later, she makes a wish, and there he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To All Our Last Sunrises

Clara was an old woman.

She wasn’t sure how old, exactly, as time had stopped being simply linear for her years ago, days had changed their lengths as she swept through galaxies. But she was old. It must have been something like fifty years since she had first stepped into this Tardis, running away with Ashildr under the impression that she’d feel young forever.

But it didn’t always feel like it. Her looks belied her age; she still had all the graceful glow of a young woman, but perhaps with a little more gathered wisdom in her eyes. There was no set time to retire and settle down, no death approaching… Just a long stretch of time that she had more control over than was probably allowed.

Clara is sitting against the wall of the control room rereading some E.M. Forster when Ashildr walks in looking determined. She hasn’t changed a bit. These past fifty years must have felt like a week from her perspective.

“We haven’t done winter in a while,” she says, fiddling over the controls. “We seem to always choose spring days for our trips…how about some snow?”

Clara looks up from her book and smiles. “Yeah, snow is fine, let me know when you’re ready to go and I’ll get dressed.”

Ashildr shrugged. “Why don’t we go now? I found this lovely place off the Cylindrical Spiral Galaxy, it’s called the ‘Fairy Lights of the Last Sunrise’.”

Clara feels her heart grow heavy at the name. “Oh, oh…well…okay.”

“Are you sure? That’s not a place you went with…”

“Ashildr.” Clara says sternly, and she backs away. This is not something they talk about.

She had been there before, years ago, with someone she no longer allows herself to think of.

Ashildr shrugged as Clara rushed off to the Tardis wardrobe.

She had trained herself; ever since that day the diner had materialized away from him fifty years ago, to forget. To brush his name off to the side whenever something came up that reminded her of him. Which was always. It was over, it was done. If she thought about it too much she would surely go mad.

But sometimes she indulged.

Every few years something would trigger her heart back open: “pretty woman” playing on a bus, an angry man on Starship Scotland, a sonnet she’d circled in pencil in her Shakespeare book. And then Clara would let herself fall back in love, if only for an hour or so; she’d dig up old photographs and sift through memories, swooning and sighing and letting tears fall. Then everything was packed up, and it was done. A much-needed cathartic exercise was over.

Clara put on her same old blue snowsuit, one so old she had worn it when she had gone here the first time, long ago. She hadn’t really bothered to get a new one, after all these years. Ashildr was rather fond of beaches, after all.

“You ready?” Ashildr asked, popping into the wardrobe.

“Yeah,” Clara said. “Let’s go.”

Clara is hit with a blast of cold air as she opens the glass door of the diner, and finds herself looking out over a dark wintry expanse. There’s a large field spread out in front of her, covered in glistening snow, and surrounded by majestic trees covered in icicles and what must be thousands of feet worth of fairy lights. There are tents and blankets laid out in the snow, covered with all sorts of humanoid and alien creatures awaiting the sunrise, playing cards or sipping hot chocolate.

She had seen it all before, of course.

“The Fairy Lights of the Last Sunrise,” read Ashildr off her phone. “In the year 9980, the sun would soon rise for the last time for the people of the ice planet dleastanas cùraim, as afterwards the sun would burn out. The fairy lights were a festival to celebrate the last sunrise they would see before spending the rest of their lives in darkness. Legend says that a wish made on the appearance of the last rising sun has more power than any wish in the cosmos.”

Clara stared out silently as Ashildr spread a blanket on the ground and handed her a thermos of hot tea.

“Well,” Ashildr said, staring out into the night. “Now we just wait, I suppose.”

Clara was trying to brush the memories aside, but it was proving impossible. _We were here once_ , she thought. _Me and him, running through the snow._

“It’s starting!” Ashildr said, pointing to the horizon. “Look!”

The light begins to spread across the field, and there was a quiet reverence among the people, savoring the simple start of a new day’s light one last time.

“Make a wish,” Ashildr whispers.

And so Clara indulges, pushes down the walls she has built around her heart to keep herself from breaking, and wishes for something she has not allowed herself to wish for in a very long time.

She watches the field light up in orange and pink and lavender, and smiles at the icicles sparkling in the light. She smiles at the couples dancing under the trees strung up with fairy lights. They were all reveling in something they knew they could never see again, and it was beautiful and tragic in ways that made her heart ache.

Clara squeezes her eyes together and lets all her defenses down. _I wish, I wish, I wish…._

“Clara?” Ashildr asks, holding out her thermos. “Would you mind going over to the drink station and refilling this?”

“Yeah, sure,” Clara says, suddenly awakened from her stupor. “Be right back.”

Clara weaves her way around couples and families spread out on hundreds of blankets and sets her eyes on the drinks station across the field, when-

“Clara! That was fast.”

_Oh god._

Be careful what you wish for.

“What was fast?” Clara asks, turning around suddenly and nearly dropping the thermos at the sight of the Doctor, huddled inside a Tardis blue tent and wrapped up in tartan blankets.

“The snowman. That you said you were going to help those children build.”

“Oh!” Clara says, and her memory catapults her back to the same field, years ago, and how she had left the Doctor in his tent for twenty minutes to help some children. “Yeah, it’s done.”

She looks over by the trees and her eyes widen as she sees the earlier version of herself, wearing the same snow clothes and helping children get balls of snow started under the fairy lights.

If memory served her right, she would have about twenty minutes.

“Doctor…” Clara says, still a bit shocked, and she finds herself just staring, smiling so hard it hurts at the man huddled up inside the tent, his eyes lighting up at the sunrise.

He is beautiful, and he is hers, and he is right there in front of her.

“Your face is doing something new,” the Doctor said, studying her. “It’s like a very extreme version of the sad smile, I think.”

Clara laughs, and does her best to wipe away the tears forming in the corner of her eyes. It has been so, so, long.

“Why are you just staring?” the Doctor asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing, you daft old man,” Clara says, laughing giddily. “May I come in?”

The Doctor holds the flap of the tent open. “Be my guest.”

Clara climbs in and they sit together, facing the rising sun, and Clara watches the way the colors of the sunrise illuminate the lines of his face, and the blues and greens and greys of his eyes. He is there, living, breathing, being, and existing in a moment before there was any sort of tragedy between them. So much taken for granted and so much left unsaid.

Clara decides then and there that this is the moment, that she is going to do this because she is sure that she has never wanted anything more than this one, simple, wonderful thing.

“I’m a bit tired,” Clara says, faking a yawn, and she snuggles into his chest and wraps herself inside his arms.

And it is magnificent.

There she is, her head resting on a starched white collar, smelling his smell of gingerbread and lemons and library dust. He is warm and real and she can feel the double heartbeats thrumming under her head. Her heart feels like it is melting over with joy, and all those years of forcing herself to forget him fade, and as his weathered hands trace patterns down her arms she knows. She knows she will stop forgetting. She will remember him, and she will remember this.

“Clara…?” he whispers, and she can see him looking down at her, probably a bit confused, a bit scared, as he always did in these times where she showed him physical affection.

“Just hold me…” Clara whispers, snuggling deeper inside his jacket. “Please…”

“Okay,” the Doctor says, smiling down at her and draping the tartan blanket over them. “You’re the boss.”

Clara can’t help but look out at all the people spread out on the field, how they laugh and cry or just stare at the sun coming up from the horizon. All of these people who probably had never bothered to watch the sun rise before.

She thought of her younger self, on the other side of the field, building snowmen when she could have spent that time here, with him. The time taken for granted and wasted. What she would give now for two simple minutes of her life back then.

“Doctor…” Clara whispers, on the verge of tears, and she’s trying to think of something to say, something she’s allowed to speak without tearing their timeline to bits.

“I know,” the Doctor whispers back, and Clara nearly gasps as he starts to brush back strands of her hair behind her ear. “It’s never easy watching people watch their last sunrise.”

And Clara stays silent, cuddling deeper still into the warmth of him, of his affection and of a love that she thought was long dead to her, but here it was, alive.

Clara pulls herself away for a moment to peek outside the tent, and sees that the other Clara is nearly finished with the snowman. It was time to go.

She tries her best not to burst into tears as she squeezes him into one last hug, and kisses him on the cheek. “To all our last sunrises, Doctor.”

The Doctor smiles at her, a bit bewildered, as if he senses something is a bit off, but he just nods. “To all our last sunrises, Clara Oswald.”

And then Clara has to do the hardest thing she’s ever had to do, once again, and turn away from him.

“I’ll be right back,” Clara says, as casually as she can muster, and she tries her hardest to memorize the way he is smiling at her, and then she turns around and walks.

Clara ducks behind one of the trees strung up with fairy lights and watches another Clara come striding up to the tent.

“Done with the snowman!” she says, warmth and innocent joy emanating from her every step. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to head home. One of those boys put a snowball down my back and I’d really like to change.”

The Doctor stares at her, confused. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, and the younger Clara starts packing up the tent, already in her usual rush to get to another planet or another class to teach.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor says, “Never mind.”

And then the younger Clara smiles at him and he beams, and the two of them are walking over to a blue box parked in the middle of the field.

Clara is watching them walk away together, which is something she realizes she’s never really gotten the chance to see. She is telling him about something one of the kids had said and smiling, exactly identical to her, but somehow so much younger.

As the sunrise lights up her face she sees it, really sees it for the first time, the Doctor smiling at her as she’s talking, looking at her as if she is the most miraculous and beautiful thing he’s ever seen, the sun and stars and planets all at once, and Clara can’t remember the last time she’s felt this loved, or this lucky.

She basks in the warmth of the newly risen sun on the snow and takes in the two silhouettes walking away from her: the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the Tardis.


End file.
